


the shape of a thing itself

by 23Murasaki



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Gen, Home, Introspection, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, be proud of me this could be canon if you squint, the author's general complaints about the watchers council as an institution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 07:35:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19883977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/23Murasaki/pseuds/23Murasaki
Summary: All his life, he's drifted between names and places that don't fit quite right. He should be used to it by now.(Or: Five times Rupert Giles wasn't quite home, and one time he was.)





	the shape of a thing itself

**Author's Note:**

> I guess Giles moping about his identity is the theme of the summer?

(1)

Fairweather House has high ceilings portraits of long-dead Watchers that look down grimly on their descendants. Rupert’s too old to be afraid of them, really, but their empty eyes still give him the creeps. He supposes that it’s rather what they’re supposed to do—surely no monster would dare cross their lines of sight. (It works on people, after all, his father and grandmother grow cold and his mother grows quiet and the Fairweather servants rush through the halls with their heads down. Why should monsters be any different?)

It’s home, supposedly, it’s the ancestral seat of the family, it’s where twenty-seven generations lived and died and were buried (though the house has been rebuilt, of course, quite a few times over the centuries), but the only part Rupert doesn’t feel like he’s trespassing on are the fields on the western side of the grounds. There’s rolling green there, hills and valleys and blooming flowers in spring and summer, and when he can he runs the length of them with his model planes or chases birds or sword-fights invisible enemies. (When he’s older, a bit, he brings schoolbooks and spell ingredients, a bit older than that he brings a guitar. The point’s much the same, though he can’t quite articulate it: he feels ever so much more alive out there than he does under his grandmother’s roof.)

He’ll grow into it, he’s sure. Someday, when he’s really a Watcher, he will stand under the portraits’ eyes and feel proper rather than queasy. He’ll grow into it because everyone says he’s like them, like his grandmother, because he has her eyes and her hair and her steady hands and her Fairweather talent for magic. (That’s not right, though, he thinks sometimes, when he forgets that Watchers don’t doubt. That’s not right because he’s not a Fairweather, not quite.)

———  
(2)

After years at the Academy, Oxford doesn’t loom. It beckons, instead, painted golden-bright in afternoon sun. Rupert can almost vanish into the crowds of students here, almost become one of them—there’s rugby, real rugby, and things to study beyond the esoteric and turntables and bars and dartboards bigger than his head and people who don’t say he’s got a Fairweather look. (They say other things, he’s got all sorts of looks, but if he avoids his old classmates during the day he’s only ever Rupert Edmund Giles.) 

It’s home, he’s told, at least for the next few years, then alma mater after that. It means bountiful mother, in Latin, the mother of one’s mind and learning, and for all his new classmates it may well be that. Rupert, though, and his fellow Watchers-in-training, are only stepchildren (cuckoos in the nest, he thinks). Their minds were bred elsewhere, and when night falls on Oxford they sit over books on demonology and magic and prophecy and know that whatever they study in daylight will never matter quite so much. (It’s almost a thrill, at first, keeping a secret from the rest of the world, but it’s not really a secret society if the whole university knows it exists, is it? It’s only a secret outside the walls, where students trade knowing looks in front of real outsiders.)

There’s generations of them, another Watcher tells him, generations of people just like him at Oxford and Cambridge and across the ocean in Harvard and Miskatonic and Yale, gentlemen and scholars with the knowledge and ability to protect their people. (That’s not quite right, though, he thinks later, after he’s nodded and smiled and stammered through that interaction. These aren’t his people, not the Watchers, not Oxford, not the secret smiles and secret societies that Rupert Edmund Giles has born-and-bred right to. Watchers don’t doubt, Watchers don’t question, Watchers don’t try on new names in bar bathrooms. What Watchers do, he’ll learn a very short while later, is die for nothing.)

———  
(3)

Randall’s flat isn’t really even Randall’s, and truth be told Ru—Ripper isn’t entirely sure it qualifies as a flat. The first night he spends in London, once his heart stops hammering in his chest and the painkillers kick in and dull the ache of bruises, he curls on his side on the broken couch and listens to all the sounds. He’s never thought about it before, but all the previous places he’s lived have been quiet. Here, he can hear cars and footsteps and the rumble of a generator and people breathing and distant voices and laughter. It’s different, it’s strange, he’s not sure if he likes it. (He’s not sure if any dislike is his, though, as opposed to something learned and trained.)

It’s home, though, it has to be, because it’s a thousand times more real than anything else he’s ever lived, like an answer he’s been looking for all his life. (He thinks of dead classmates when he closes his eyes, but they’re not his anymore. Maybe they never were, or he was never theirs.) He forces himself upright (can’t sleep like this), and wanders the broken-down rooms with the sleeping bags and blankets and piles of clothes. There aren’t doors here, and there’s no judgement bearing down from generations past, so he’ll learn to love the broken things just for the freedom they promise. (There’s a young sorcerer reading by werelight who looks up and grins at the sound of Ripper’s footsteps. He doesn’t think of the past, not ever, and Ripper feels a pang of envy. That’s alright, he can learn. He’d always been good at that.)

It’s not until later, much too late, he realizes he’d never been free to start with. (That’s what’s meant when Watchers don’t doubt, really. They live long enough to know they will never be comfortable and people will never be safe and they will never be able to fade into shadows or crowds or London brickwork or a lover’s arms. They know too much, he knows too much, to truly be Ripper.)

———  
(4)

The Council’s archives should be an escape. They’re silent, soundless, stable, Giles is as cut off from the world and its nightmares there as he is from his magic, penance paid not for Randall’s death but daring to leave—and to return. They feel like a grave, and it makes his skin crawl. Sometimes he can go days without seeing another living soul. (The books, though, they’re a mercy. They smell of ink and old paper and history, and they teach without judgement or pain. Sometimes he can go a whole day just reading when he should be shelving, and when that happens there’s no one there to chide him for it.)

It’s home, then, because there’s nowhere else to go. Something in him has broken (maybe it was broken long ago) so he walks the archives until he knows every piece by touch and scent, he reads in the dark until his eyesight is shot, he goes for days and days without speaking and weeks without meeting anyone’s eyes. (They don’t say he’s got the Fairweather look to him anymore, now, even though his eyes and hair and the lines of his face fit right in with the portraits on the manor walls. Passivity isn’t a Fairweather look, and there’s a tremor in his hands that doesn’t seem to go away. It’s alright, though. No one’s there to see.) 

He’d almost forgotten that there was a larger duty (a larger world, even, though he can’t truly forget that) when he’s called to stand before the Council yet again, and he stumbles on his name and fidgets and shivers. (And he misses the secret smile and knowing look that passes between two of the Councilmen, after everything’s said and he’s handed a one-way ticket to what he doesn’t know is a Hellmouth. The world’s going to end and the Council will protect its people, and what the rest do is die for greater good.)

———  
(5)

It’s an honor, it’s his sacred duty, but Sunnydale is painfully bright and hot and loud, sunlight overlaid (or underlaid) with something he can’t quite feel anymore but that he knows is there. It’s surely not important. There’s a Slayer here, one who had lost her last Watcher, one who had never been trained, some little girl who surely doesn’t know the depth of what she faces. (He’d read the file on the plane, even though it didn’t much matter who she’d been before. She was a Slayer now, and he was nothing more and nothing less than her Watcher.)

It’s home, for now, the flat that the Council set up that he fills with books, and the sun-drenched town with its history of darkness, and he sits with his boxes and his tweed and looks out a window at an unfamiliar view and feels nothing at all. Maybe it’s better this way. (He practices his name in the bathroom mirror and tries not to look at the unfamiliar face reflected back — Rupert Edmund Giles, my name is Rupert Edmund Giles, Rupert Giles, the librarian — but stumbles on it every time.) And he learns the path to walk to the school and back, and he learns his way around the library with its empty shelves that he fills with heavy texts on demonology, and he reads until his eyes hurt and stumbles on his introduction at the staff meeting. (And his hands shake so much he knocks over his styrofoam cup of awful, cheap tea, and at least three people help him mop it up with napkins. It’s jarring and strange and none of them are supposed to be relevant to his duty, and that night he dreams snatches of dreams of faraway laughter and rugby and a flat without doors and rolling green hills and golden afternoon sun.)

The Slayer is loud and sunshine-bright and stubborn, and Giles can only understand every third word she says. She refuses to listen, she refuses her duty, she wears leopard print and curls her bangs and stands up for people she’s known for ten minutes and is vividly, angrily alive. (She’ll die, he realizes, though he’s already known that. They all die young and the longer they live the more they know so she’ll never be free and alive and herself again, not really. The realization hurts, it hurts more than anything had in the past two decades, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s meant to Watch, not to intervene, but he’s never quite been able to fade into shadows or crowds or library bookshelves.)

———  
(+1)

“Giles!” 

Every day for three-fourths of the year, Sunnydale is in a state of summer. The first year he’d been half-starved and constantly cold anyway, the second he’d been too busy riding a long-forgotten high of victory until it had fallen apart, and each year after somehow felt a little bit more like home. It’s gone now, of course, the school and the library and the flat where he’d lived for almost seven years and the town and the Hellmouth itself (and the Council too, all of them, and a great many other things), but the summer-in-California sun is the same as it ever was, and the young woman who drops into step beside him is (older, twice dead, Chosen and lost and forsaken and a great many other things too) vividly, angrily alive. 

“Giles, are you in there?” she asks, half-teasing and half-concerned. There are things to be done, and instead of doing them he’s wandering down a street with a probably awfully vague expression on his face. 

“Er, mostly. Why?” he answers. Buffy rolls her eyes and huffs. 

“Have you been paying any attention?” she asks. 

He has, he has, they’re planning a birthday party for Faith—Buffy and Willow and Xander at the helm, of course, and it’s gotten them so far off of the concept of apocalypses that they look almost ordinary. They're not, of course, and they’ll never be, but it’s moments like that that Giles remembers most fondly. Worlds can end, lives can shatter, but there’s something to be said for cupcakes and sprinkles and shopping sprees and the stubborn refusal to take the world as it is supposed to be. (He’s not always sure what that something is, of course, but it’s all tied up in the feeling of winning and of sanctuary and that’s close enough to understanding, close enough to fight for.)

So he says something about chocolate chips, which is deemed partially satisfactory, and reminds Buffy that she has an oven in San Francisco but they’re halfway to LA and therefore not exactly well-suited to baking, which is deemed being a spoilsport, and Willow yells that baking with magic is a bad and explody idea in case they’d wondered, and Xander asks why they can’t just buy cupcakes like normal people and the matter devolves into bickering over the definition of normal. 

And it’s a sun-baked rest stop in a country that’s never been his in a world that should have ended too many times over, but it doesn’t matter all that much. (Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling or perhaps a state of being, something intangible that, somehow, he’d stumbled upon long after he’d stopped looking. It’s something to live for.)


End file.
